Munich Fest Preview: Coppola, Cranston and Cannes Films

Munich Fest Preview: Coppola, Cranston and Cannes Films

Article excerpt

The festival has secured an impressive array of films from this year’s Cannes.

With Cannes being held later than usual this year, it was a close call for Munich Film Festival director Diana Iljine and her team of programmers to have their line-up done and dusted by the end of May. But they succeeded in selecting a raft of titles fresh from their Cannes premieres to screen between June 22 and July 1.

These include Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless, Valeska Grisebach’s Western, Sergei Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature, Léa Mysius’ debut Ava and Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, which will be shown as part of a retrospective for the US filmmaker. Moreover, veteran French filmmaker Claire Denis’ Let The Sunshine In, which screened in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, will open Munich.

Now heading her sixth edition as festival director, Iljine identifies “youth on the move” as a common factor in many of the selected films. “Another theme is creative resistance - the rebellion against restrictive structures sees the imagination coming into play and being transported onto the screen in a variety of ways by the international filmmakers,” she observes.

Programmer Bernhard Karl adds that this year’s International Programme features a “significant focus” on films from Russia, Iran and China, including Iranian director Navid Mahmoudi’s Parting, The Summer Is Gone from China’s Zhang Dalei, and veteran Russian filmmaker Pavel Lungin’s Queen Of Spades.

Other highlights for the festival’s 35th edition will include Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston receiving the festival’s CineMerit Award at a gala ceremony with the European premiere of his latest film Wakefield, and UK actor Bill Nighy and producer Stephen Woolley presenting Lone Scherfig’s Their Finest as Munich’s closing film.

Going Deutsche

“What really struck me during my selection for the New German Cinema sidebar was that there is an increasing desire and ambition by filmmakers to play with genre elements in both the freely financed and classically funded films,” says curator Christoph Gröner about this year’s line-up of 20 world premieres.

Actor-director RP Kahl, for example, combines psychological thriller with stream-of-consciousness desert trip for his A Thought Of Ecstasy, while Nina Vukovic imbues a family drama with a thriller plot for Detour. …

A primary source is a work that is being studied, or that provides first-hand or direct evidence on a topic. Common types of primary sources include works of literature, historical documents, original philosophical writings, and religious texts.